


Masquerade

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, Angst, Crossdressing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 11:44:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7890649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Bucky, who ends up with the job dancing at the Masquerade. (It's Steve, who helps him with the belt, and with the dress. It's Steve, who everyone at the club thinks is going to leave.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to blame cabloom for this, because she speaks the Queen's English, and therefore is clearly at fault for reading "suspenders on his shoulders" and thinking "why are they wearing suspenders (British for garter belts) on their shoulders?" I don't even know how we got here from there. Dance clubs with women dressed as men or men dressed as women were not uncommon in the 1920s, especially in Harlem, but La Guardia started cracking down on a variety of things when he took office in 1934.

At some point in time, Bucky had developed the odd habit of shimmying out of his unlaced garter belt without unhooking it, chucking it over one shoulder, and using the straps to clip up the sleeves of his oversized house shirt.

He said it kept the belt loose, easier to wear for hours on his feet in an old pair of heels that had belonged to Sam before she’d joined the circus and gone west. Personally, Steve thought Bucky had never grown out of the phase where they’d stolen his Ma’s garter belts and worn them like rounds of ammunition, playing soldiers.

Technically, Bucky was still wearing Mrs. Rogers’s garter belts, only now he was wearing them to pay the rent.

Sam had known the boys couldn’t pay the bills, after Sarah died. She spent most of her time down at The Masquerade, sipping free drinks and accepting compliments, knew the owner well enough to suggest that he take on a new waiter or two. Sam had meant the job for Steve — Steve had knobby knees and feet the size of subway cars, but he also had high cheekbones and a waist begging for a corset — but Steve wasn’t about to roll on a pair of stockings and shed what little self-respect he had left.

It was different for Bucky, and they both knew it. Bucky played football on the weekends, in Prospect Park, acting as quarterback and talking strategy with Steve on the walk home. Men tipped their hats to Bucky, on the street, where they still rumpled Steve’s hair as if he were in shorts holding a lollipop. Bucky could get Steve to paint pink over his cheekbones and cherry onto his lips, throw on a cloche hat and still look like he might dimple at you while socking you into next week.

(Steve kept those thoughts to himself — generally kept them to their bed once he was alone in the room, eyes closed and breaths fast as he imagined Bucky at work.)

Sam had given them some of her old outfits, and Steve had spent a week biting pins between his teeth, Bucky standing in his bare feet draped in sequins and chiffon, yelping when Steve accidentally caught him in the ribs with a pin. Bucky, standing in the old shirt his Da had left, silk stockings caught on his hairy legs, his cotton shorts bunched up and ridiculous beneath the garter belt Steve was trying to take in. They’d pulled the laces taut, but Bucky had the slim hips of a young man and not the waist of a nurse who had birthed Steve Rogers and hauled him repeatedly out of his own grave.

The pay was good. Better than the docks, Bucky said, especially after La Guardia started cracking down on the best joints Harlem and more men and women came to Brooklyn instead. The owner was careful about his waitstaff, and Bucky could take extra money for a dance, but it was the sort of dance that stayed on the dance floor and everyone’s hands stayed above their belts. (Even if no one but Steve knew what Bucky’s belt looked like, underneath the bias cut of his sequined dress.)


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky catches Steve a month after he starts working at the Masquerade, comes home still dressed as _Jamie_ in his heels, the fringe on his skirt brushing over the stockings where they hitch up over his knees. Comes home to find Steve arching off the bed, one of Bucky’s club dresses pressed over his face, his pants down and his hand squeezed tight around his dick.

The fabric of the dress hides Steve’s face from view, lets him stare sightlessly into beads and thin silk without having to see the disgust on Bucky’s face, muffles the sounds his heels will make as he spits and walks away. Steve gasps, sucking material against his open mouth, arousal numbing the ends of his fingers, choking on the smell of Bucky’s perfume and the nausea strangling the orgasm curling in his gut.

The bed squeaks — or maybe that’s Steve, a high, terrified whine at the top of his throat — and Bucky’s weight dips the mattress, the sequins of his dress scratching against Steve’s ribs, dress hiked up and the bare skin of his upper thigh against Steve’s hip, the metal clasp of the garter belt and the liquid smooth feel of the silk stockings rubbing away at Steve’s control.

“Having a good time?” Bucky rumbles, leaning across Steve, resting his weight on a hand that brushes Steve’s shoulder, smelling of smoke and cheap gin and the last hints of his perfume. “Or do you want a hand?”

Steve keens out an inarticulate noise that could mean anything, scrabbling clumsy fingers over the slick tops of Bucky’s stockings and digging into the muscles of his thigh. Bucky must take it for agreement, though, because he tugs the material off of Steve’s face and presses the waxy rust-red of his lips to Steve’s panting mouth, slides his hand slowly down the jutting bones of Steve’s chest and curls his fingers around Steve’s leaking cock, rubs his thumb over the head with the same fond nudge he gives to Steve’s nose.

“Breathe, you idiot,” he commands, laughing, and then proceeds to make that impossible, stealing the air from Steve’s lungs and sending him flailing against Bucky’s sequined, perfumed skin.

Bucky hears a lot of things, working nights at the Masquerade. “Never trust a boy on his first drink, or after his third.” “Tuck the money into your brassiere, not your belt — they’ll be trying to stick their hands up your skirt.” “The only dance they’re paying for is the one on this floor, send ‘em over to the Navy Yard if they’re looking to tango.”

Not all of them on the floor are queer — Annie in her tuxedo just likes the job, Richard caught consumption as a kid and never really grew out of it, too frail for more than a few hours a night — but most of them are, or at least considering. It’s hard not to be, hours on your feet in heels and the slip of stockings as your legs cross in a spin, a warm hand at the base of your spine and a cigarette in the alley with the other ‘girls,’ Joe’s skirt hiked up and Jerry’s crimson lipstick smeared over Joe’s lips and down his dick.

Bucky’s heard a lot of things about that, too. How to avoid the cops, what the rates are if he wants to start working _outside_ the club as well as in, how to spot a guy with the French disease.

Mostly, though, he hears about the leaving. Joe’s got a dame, Bertha; he’s quitting soon as he’s saved up enough for their first house and a ring. Jerry doesn’t seem too bothered, shrugs and says once Joe's gone straight he can always head to the park, his mouth a blood-red slash as he smirks and waggles his eyebrows at Bucky, because _who doesn’t want a pretty thing like me on my knees, Barnes? Huh?_ Bill has a wife, somewhere, had a lover in Mexico that might have a wife somewhere, too, drifts in and out of the club and in and out of prison loose and hazy with drugs, and Bucky’s not sure Bill ever comprehends more than the sweat trailing down his partner’s throat, the electric press of skin gone as soon as it pulls away, everyone a stranger when he opens his eyes.

“I want to thank God for making me a fairy,” Mario — Rita — announces one night, exhaling smoke at the Brooklyn sky, cherry lips pursed in a perfect ‘o’. “No kids, no nagging wife. All the sex I want at the Yard and no one complaining about the lipstick stains on my shirts.”

All the girls at the Masquerade think Steve is a fairy. That’s not their fault — half of Brooklyn thinks Steve is a fairy, and Bucky’s still pretty certain that’s why Steve insisted he keep taking orders at the soda shop while Bucky threw on some glad rags and danced for his half of the rent. The girls think Steve spends his evenings at the park, or the Yard; they elbow Bucky and giggle when Steve comes by the club near closing, hair sticking straight up on one side and bottom lip swollen and red.

Bucky knows it’s because Steve has been drawing — chews his bottom lip whenever he doesn’t like a line, wants something there that he can’t see — and probably fell asleep on the table again, woke up and it was too quiet with Mrs. Rogers dead and Bucky gone, so he comes down to the club and nurses a whiskey for the ice.

Bucky knows that he’s the only one who gets Steve on his knees, or knocking his head into a wall and moaning loud enough to wake the dead. He knows the way Steve tastes when Bucky’s lipstick is smeared down his cock, the way he whimpers when Bucky rolls him over and leaves smudged kisses like brands on Steve’s pale skin. It’s been two months now, since they started, and there’s so much left that Bucky _doesn’t_ know — but he’s guessing all this makes him queer, makes Steve at least a little bit bent — and he knows that _queer_ means _going, going, gone_.

Bucky holds onto Steve at night, after, bites kisses into his skin that won’t scrub away, and wonders how long he has left before Steve offers him a crimson smirk and thanks God for making him a fairy as he goes to the Yard, looking for something more.


End file.
